Sharla P. Boehm was the first author (along with Paul Baran) of the memo "On Distributed Communications: II. Digital Simulation of Hot-Potato Routing in a Broadband Communications Network", published in 1964. This memo was the original work demonstrating the feasibility of packet switching on a wide-area network, which is the technical foundation of the Internet. She was a programmer at the Rand Corporation during the 1960s, and currently lives in Santa Monica, California.